History of the Term Bohemia,Bohemian,Boheme, ect.
Bohemia was orginally a small kingdom in Eastern Europe, and was absorbed by Czeckoslovokia (now the Czech Republic) after WWI. Bohemia's first known inhabitants were the Boii, who gave the country its name. By the 400's, both Slavs and Germans lived in the area. Bohemia was a German duchy during the 1000's, but became independent in 1198. During the 1200's, it was a powerful country. A period of civil wars followed the esecution of John Huss in the early 1400's. These wars were called the Hussite Wars.
After the Hussite Wars, the people of Bohemia followed a mildly Protestant form of religion, but, in 1526, the country fell under the rule fo the Catholic Hapsburgs. Their repression of Protestantism caused the Thirty years' War, which nearly ruined the country. Bohemia was ruled by Auastria-Hungary until the end of Worl War I, when it became part of Czeckoslovakia under the treaty of Versailles. Germany annexed the Sudentenland area of Bohemia in 1938 and occupied all of Czechoslocakia in 1939. In the late 1940's, Bohemia came under communist domination when Czechoslovakia became a Russian Satellite. The term "Bohemian", however, was ofter used incorrectly in reference to Gypsies, who are now believed to have originated from the Middle East.
Felix Pyat, a popular French journalist and dramatist. is believed to have first used the expression "Bohemian" (meaning "Gypsy") to describe the improvished young artists and students in Paris. Felix Pyat wrote a series of essays in a publication called Nouveau Tableau de Paris au XIX Siecle in 1843,descibing them as "alien and bizarre...outside the law, beyond the reaches of society...they are the Bohemians of today."
The term did not catch on in a huge way, though, until 1845 when a writer named Henry Murger, himself a bohemian (and the model for his own character Rodolphe), began producing a series of stories about himself and his friends for a small Paris newspaper called Le Corsaire-Satan. These stories were later collected in book form and staged as a play, Scenes de la vie de Boheme (1849), which was a tremendous hit and an almost unbelievably definitive influence on French society. Today this play is mainly known as the source of the Puccini opera La Boheme, but the opera was not introduced until 1896, when the Bohemian youth movement had already been old news for decades.(This part is mostly quoted from Literary Kicks)
In 1996, Jonathan Larson revised La Boheme into a more contemporary portrait of bohemian life in America with the musical RENT.
"Bohemians are society's outlaws - mavericks, vagabonds, mad scientists, gypsies, theater people, artists, deviants, radicals, outsiders.
...
Bohemians change the world."
-Laren Stover
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